Ooh goody, I've found someone to tease

From an answer to one of my comments in someone else's journal ...

you keep your dream/fantasy life pathetically separated from your everyday life .. you suscribe to the practical thought system which just does not cut it for you. you dream too much of superheroes,, have you ever watched Unbreakable? the invention of the superhero came to be because in certain people there is found a highly developed, nay superhuman, ability of body or mind. you force resignation on yourself, i can see the insanity bubbling underneath your fascismile of caregiver. you've amputated a part of yourself. the ability to dream of what could be. why? complacent. you're trying to be complacent. satisfied. you're trying to conform. you want to be protected. and you spray every little code of behavior in thought and action that your Academia pressures you to accept. that's why i called you a televangelist. "with this tremendous vociferation may i reach the realm of god". i can't tell you anymore. i despise moderates. stop bothering me.

Stuff like this makes it all worthwhile!

I responded to the post, but I'm wondering if I should continue, especially since
(a) it's in someone else's journal, and it's not very polite to use another person's journal as a forum for verbal slugfests;
(b) sparring with teenage Nietzsche-wannabes is like shooting fish in a barrel.

OS/2

I just saw a post on a mailing list for LyX* with the subject header "Anyone using LyX on OS/2"? I imagine it could be shortened to "Anyone using OS/2?" - I thought it was only used in things like ATMs these days (I found this out by accident when I tried to do a bank transfer and forced the thing to reboot - if I'd had my wits about me I might just have been able to make it spew out it's entire contents).

Anyway, I think it's cool that some people are still using obscure operating systems like OS/2 and BeOS. After all, it isn't so long ago that Bill Gates was saying that OS/2 was the future of computing.

Onilne communities and exclusivity

The delightfuly abusive comment I recently received (see previous entry) is making me ask myself questions about the boundaries of online communities. Part of me yearns for the days when you had to be pretty geeky just to get online at all, and would like an online community where you could only read or post if you could fulfill certain criteria, like being able to write a perl or shell script, name more than half of the dwarves in The Hobbit or tell the difference between a quasar and a pulsar. The other part really enjoys the anarchy of the Web, and would like to see more rednecks, teenage übermenschen and Islamic fundamentalists online.

Bloody caregiving

(from that flame I posted earlier)
i can see the insanity bubbling underneath your fascismile of caregiver.

I'm beginning to see his point of view. It's 2 a.m., and I have to get up at 6 a.m. to take my father-in-law to hospital. Bubble, bubble, toil and trouble.